Iris Howley

• PhD in Human-Computer Interaction
• Professor (Assistant) at Williams College

This chapter compares two multidimensional analyses of the PLTL Chemistry dataset, which each include a cognitive, relational, and motivational dimension. These multidimensional analyses serve to highlight the ways in which the complementary perspectives on collaborative processes offered by each dimension can be integrated in a way that offers dee...

This chapter reports on our efforts to develop automated assessment of collaborative processes, in order to support effective participation in learning-relevant discussion. This chapter presents resources that can be offered to this assessment community by machine learning and computational linguistics. The goal is to raise awareness of opportuniti...

Learning analytics systems have the potential to bring enormous value to online education. Unfortunately, many instructors and platforms do not adequately leverage learning analytics in their courses today. In this paper, we report on the value of these systems from the perspective of course instructors. We study these ideas through OARS, a modular...

Purpose Process-oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL) is a series of learning activities building on student prior knowledge guiding them to construct their own understanding of new concepts in collaborative roles. This paper aims to illustrate how POGIL worksheets can be adapted for low bandwidth and low-computing environments to accommodate th...

Students use learning analytics systems to make day-to-day learning decisions, but may not understand their potential flaws. This work delves into student understanding of an example learning analytics algorithm, Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT), using Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) to identify knowledge components (KCs) comprising expert student un...

We examine whether augmenting traditional coding environments with ProDirect manipulation improves several learning measures. ProDirect manipulation is a novel user interaction model that provides a bidirectional link between code and outputs. Instead of reasoning abstractly about the output a program might produce, users instead directly manipulat...

This Workshop is intended to be a generative space for participants to create a module on ethics in a Computer Science course of their choice. Participants will choose an existing course in the typical CS curriculum; and coalesce around common themes to create a module that integrates critical reflection on ethical choices and societal impact of co...

This paper reviews work in progress towards bridging the field of linguistics and its operationalizations of discourse, and that of frameworks for studying collaborative learning that are rooted directly in the learning sciences. We begin with the vision of a multi-dimensional coding and counting analysis approach that might serve as a boundary obj...

Through the lens of Expectancy Value Theory, we examine the effect of help giver badges, information about helper expertise, and up- and downvoting on help seeking in a MOOC discussion forum. Results show that badges alleviated the negative impact on help seeking introduced by up- and downvoting.

This interactive event is meant to engage the CSCL community in brainstorming about what affordances in MOOCs would enable application of and research extending theories and best practices from our field. To provide a concrete focus as a foundation for this discussion, we present the innovative design of a recent edX MOOC entitled Data, Analytics,...

This study investigates whether the presence of a social robot and interaction with it raises children’s interest in science. We placed Robovie, our social robot, in an elementary school science class where children could freely interact with it during their breaks. Robovie was tele-operated and its behaviors were designed to answer any questions r...

Thousands of students enroll in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to seek opportunities for learning and selfimprovement. However, the learning process often involves struggles with confusion, which may have an adverse effect on the course participation experience, leading to dropout along the way. In this paper, we quantify that effect. We descr...

The unique social presence of robots can be leveraged in learning situations to reduce student evaluation anxiety, while still providing instructional guidance on multiple levels of communication. Furthermore, social role of the instructor can also impact the prevalence of evaluation apprehension. In this study, we examine how human and robot socia...

Data from an early stage of development of conversational agent based support for collaborative learning provides an ideal resource for demonstrating the value of sociolinguistic style analysis paired with time series visualizations as part of an iterative design process. The methodology illustrated in this chapter was introduced in earlier publica...

This paper investigates the use of conversational agents to scaffold online collaborative learning discussions through an approach called academically productive talk (APT). In contrast to past work on dynamic support for collaborative learning, which has involved using agents to elevate the conceptual depth of collaborative discussion by leading s...

Accountable Talk is a form of classroom interaction that positions students as thinkers in interaction and encourages students to make their thinking visible for collaborative reasoning. This paper reports on a two-year teacher professional development program in which teachers were coached to use Accountable Talk practices in their classrooms. Onl...

The arrival of a new interest-sharing network, So.cl, provides for a new opportunity to explore human behavior as it relates to constructing public contributions and receiving community response. This study looks at archival data in order to better understand how types of shared content receive interaction from others. The results suggest that a So...

In this paper, we investigate the use of conversational agents to scaffold on-line collaborative learning discussions through an approach called academically productive talk. In contrast to past work, which has involved using agents to elevate the conceptual depth of collaborative discussion by leading students in groups through directed lines of r...

In this paper, we explore using an intelligent dialogue tutor to influence student academic self-efficacy, as well as its interaction with group self-efficacy composition in a dyadic learning environment. We find providing additional tutor prompts encouraging students to participate in discussion may have unexpected negative effects on self-efficac...

The emergence of potential new human-computer interaction styles enabled through technological advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computational linguistics makes it increasingly more important to formalize and evaluate these innovative approaches. In this position paper, we propose a multi-dimensional conversation analys...

With over 13.3 million children living below poverty line in the United States, there is a pressing need for engaging HCI research with children at the socio-economic margins. Drawing from design studio culture and art therapy literature, we explore wearable computing as a creative and tangible medium (similar to markers, paints, clays, etc.) for m...

With over 13.3 million children living below poverty line in the United States, there is a pressing need for engaging HCI research with children at the socio-economic margins. Drawing from design studio culture and art therapy literature, we explore wearable computing as a creative and tangible medium (similar to markers, paints, clays, etc.) for m...

Past research in individual learning settings has shown that student dispositions such as self-efficacy are predictive of learning and other beneficial outcomes, but the relationship is less clear in a collaborative learning environment. This paper explores authoritativeness of stance within a conversation as a social factor influencing learning an...

Previous work suggests that student dispositional attributes have an effect on help-seeking behaviors. We report on studies attempting to apply this work to a computer-supported collaborative environment that suggest that dispositional attributes of motivation orientation and self-efficacy may be more easily examined in the context of task choices...

In this interactive poster we demonstrate the VMT-Basilica environment that provides facilities for rapid prototyping of computer supported collaborative learning environments that support collaboration in a way that is responsive to what is happening in the collaboration rather than behaving in a "one size fits all fashion".

This poster describes a controlled study that examines how individual motivation orientations affect computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) activities with an adaptive themodynamics dialogue tutor. Our results show that motivation orientation has an effect on perceptions of one's learning partner, and possibly one's self-confidence.

We present the results of a study in which we contrast alternative forms of collaborative learning support in the midst of a collaborative design task in which students negotiate between increasing power and increasing environmental friendliness. Our research question is whether interactive instructional support in collaborative learning environmen...

Cognitive Tutors have been shown to lead to impressive improvement in student learning in a range of domains, including middle school mathematics. Most Cognitive Tutors focus on providing learning support for tasks involving problem solving. They typically emphasize facilitating the acquisition of procedural knowledge, on the assumption that the ac...

The motivating effects of collaborative learning have long been argued, however a careful analysis of the relationship between the motivation orientation of a student and perceptions of himself, his partners, his collaborative behaviors, and learning in a collaborative context have not been as thoroughly explored. In this paper we present an explor...

In Life Cycle Engineering, it is vital that the engineering knowledge for the product is captured throughout its life cycle in a formal and structured manner. This will allow the information to be referred to in the future by engineers who did not work on the original design but are wanting to understand the reasons that certain design decisions we...

Within the context of life cycle engineering it is important that structured engineering information and knowledge are captured at all phases of the product life cycle for future reference. This is especially the case for long life cycle projects which see a large number of engineering decisions made at the early to mid-stages of a productpsilas li...

Organisations across sectors such as aerospace, construction, defence and health care are increasingly being asked not only to provide products in the first instance, but also to support them throughout their service life. Virtually all engineering products are designed using Computer Aided Design (CAD) analysis and simulation systems. Today's CAD...

There has been a great deal of interest recently in the problem of long term archiving of digital data. This is especially so in engineering design, where the CAD software tools evolve rapidly but the manufactured products themselves have much longer lifetimes whose support requires archived design data in a usable form. The ISO Open Archival Infor...

Mobile ad hoc networks will form a critical part of the first-responder communications infrastructure. Empirical data shows how network-aware, autonomous, mobile agents can manage information services on live manet environments. A multidisciplinary team in Drexel University's College of Engineering has been working with local law enforcement and tr...

Using smart-phones for ad-hoc mathematical collaboration poses multiple user interface challenges. In this paper, software agents are used to lessen the cognitive load through automatic line labeling. Researchers in the human-computer interaction community ...

By analyzing user data collected from a fully-observable de- sign environment, this project hopes to develop a tool that will automatically capture design rationale. The project's current status leaves the experimental data represented as a directed graph, waiting for further developments.